1

IntroductionGuest Figures

In nineteenth- century American discourse, the term Arab is often figurative. Arab could and did indicate an intermediary position between foreigner and citizen, black and white, primitive and civilized. Literate black slaves on the Southern plantation, American Indians on the western frontier, and new immigrants in the urban slum were all, at one time or another, referred to as Arabs. The discursive creation of these figu-rative Arabs speaks to the shifting racial parameters of American citizen-ship, as well as to American writers’ propensity to use foreign references to redefine those parameters. Figurative Arabs thus acted as cross- cultural references that destabilized the very terms of identification by which American national discourse distinguished the United States as a histori-cally and spatially unique entity. American Arabesque provides an account of why these figurative Arabs of American literature were created and how they influenced definitions of national belonging. The mutability of the term Arab reveals American racial categories fluctuating in response to crises of national identity, such as slavery, westward expansion, and immi-gration. But tracking the figure of the Arab also demonstrates that the cat-egory of American citizenship was shaped by transnational phenomena such as Barbary captivity, Near Eastern travel, and Orientalist romance.

Of course, not all Arabs in nineteenth- century American discourse are figurative. By the end of the century, the first wave of “Arab” immigration

2 Introduction

touched American shores. These migrants, predominantly Christians from the Mount Lebanon area, inherited an American narrative on the Arabo- Islamic world that predated their physical presence in the country. How these migrants, and other groups such as African American Mus-lims, reconciled their own sense of Arab and/or Islamic identity with this Orientalist narrative to create minority claims to American citizenship is the other half of the story American Arabesque tells. In my analysis of the recurring image of the Arab in American literature, I demonstrate that figures of the Arab not only were used to create fantasies of national unity, but they also generate alternative visions of American belonging.

Let me begin by stretching out the theoretical canvas that puts this book’s methodological intervention in perspective. Edward Said’s general premise in his landmark study Orientalism is that the West creates the Orient as an object of self- contemplation. But as Said himself points out in his final collection of printed essays, Humanism and Democratic Criti-cism, the book Orientalism fails to fully account for the manifold ques-tion of agency: the agency of the Western critic, the agency of the Eastern artist, the agency of humanists both receiving and resisting the tradition they inherit.1 As a result, the Orient of the imagination still too often replaces the concrete Arab world and real Arabic words of thinkers such as Ibn Khaldun, Ibn Battutah, Ibn Arabi, and Ali Ahmed Sa’id (Adonis) as a source of literary inquiry. Constructing a critique of Western iden-tity politics that incorporates the writings of the Arab world is integral to answering the elusive question of agency, as well as the lingering ques-tion of what the Orient represents and how the Orient as a concept shapes modern subjectivity. This step toward intercultural dialectic is essential if the literary study of the Orient in the Western academy is going to pro-duce critical interventions that do more than detail co- option, misrepre-sentation, and the discursive practices of hegemony.

Albert Hourani’s Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age, 1798– 1939 is an account of how various prominent nineteenth- century Arab intellectu-als encountered, wrestled with, and transformed the terms of Western modernity to fit an Arab, Islamic, and/or Arabo- Islamic worldview. It provides, in many ways, the other half of the story Said tells about the West creating a fantasy Orient. Men such as the al- Azhar sheikh Rifa’a al- Tahtawi were active, if largely ignored, participants in modernity and formative influences on how its terms were interpreted in relation to Arab, Islamic, and Arabo- Islamic identity. Sent by Muhammad Ali to Paris in 1826, al- Tahtawi returned five years later and eventually published an

Introduction 3

account of his impressions of French society in 1834. He also undertook a massive program of translating French scientific, cultural, and philo-sophical works into Arabic. Al- Tahtawi introduced “modern” terms such as patriotism into Arab political consciousness and Arabic vernacular by creating conversations between French Enlightenment thinkers such as Montesquieu and classic Arab philosophers of the state such as Ibn Khal-dun. The progressive and nationalist strains of Arab thought that found expression in al- Tahtawi’s political philosophy were taken up by artists and intellectuals of a later generation often referred to as the Arab Renais-sance, or al Nahdah (النهده).

Al- Tahtawi’s views of the state were enacted on a literal, territorial level by the monarch he served, Egypt’s great nineteenth- century modernizer Muhammad Ali. Though Ali’s military, political, educational, social, and technical reforms were more successful and sweeping than those of other mid- nineteenth- century Arab statesman, they were part and parcel of a period in which “Arabic- speaking peoples were drawn, in different ways, into the new world order which sprang from the technical and industrial revolutions” of Europe and America.2 This period, marked by prominent debates about reform and the compatibility of European liberalism with Islamic law as well as Arab cultural identity, is what Hourani refers to as the “liberal age.” Men such as al- Tahtawi provide a vocabulary for Arabo- Islamic encounters with the West. It is not enough, I believe, to read Arab writers and American writers side by side; they must be made to converse. Placing the writings of al- Tahtawi in the context of his contemporary Edgar Allan Poe or the nation- state- building practices of Muhammad Ali in the context of Andrew Jackson’s policy of Indian removal does more than ground the fantasy Orient of nineteenth- century American litera-ture in lived experience. This contrapuntal approach creates an opportu-nity to reformulate the parameters of American Studies.

Recent critical interventions such as those compiled by Amy Kaplan and Donald Pease in Cultures of United States Imperialism, or those explored by Wai Chee Dimock and Lawrence Buell in Shades of the Planet, have emphasized the importance of recognizing alternative origin narra-tives in the formation of American national culture. These origin narra-tives, the argument goes, challenge a view of America as bounded by the physical parameters of the United States.3 My own emphasis on images of the Arab and references to Islam troubles conceptions of American cul-ture as formed by Judeo- Christian genealogies and European lineages.4 By looking at American culture through the lens of the Arabic language

4 Introduction

and American history through the filter of Arabo- Islamic history I aim to destabilize the nation’s founding narratives of identity and reconceptualize their message from a different vantage point.5 Acknowledging the presence of the Arab embedded within icons of American identity formation erodes superficial dichotomies such as East and West, revealing the strata of cul-tural interpenetration that undergird exceptionalist national fantasies.

“We are bound together because we inhabit the political space of the nation,” explains Lauren Berlant, “which is not just juridical (jus soli), genetic (jus sanguinis), linguistic, or experiential, but some tangled clus-ter of these.”6 Berlant calls this space of American group identification the “National Symbolic” and argues that it aims to link affect to political life through the production of national fantasy. National fantasy creates “citizens” by connecting narratives of national identity to “more local and personal forms of identification.”7 National fantasy, in other words, can counteract the alienating element of national identification, the fact that it requires self- ablation, by binding national narratives to personal narra-tives. Critics such as Berlant and Dana D. Nelson have demonstrated the double movement of national fantasy and its legal counterpart, national citizenship. American citizenship disembodies the material individual in order to embody virtually the abstract notion of the nation in images, sites, and narratives that can then be reabsorbed as personalized expressions of group identity. These abstractions mediate the national symbolic through fantasy. That is, these abstractions remove racial, ethnic, religious, and cul-tural difference to create a national identity. But, as critics such as David Kazanjian have argued, erasures of difference are often recursive in that they simultaneously work to inscribe a normative (white, Christian, Euro-pean) particularity into the putatively universal national identity.

The dialectic between amelioration and alienation played out through national fantasy resonates with the etymology of the word for transla-tion in Arabic, tarjamah (تْرخمة). “Tarjamah, therefore, carries connota-tions of alienated speech that has the flavor of falsehood, damnation, and death,” Wail Hassan explains, “but also possibilities of survival, narra-tion, and understanding.”8 American Arabesque does more than suggest that American citizenship is a form of translation. It argues that aesthetic abstractions of material Arab culture limn the affinities between rep-resenting Arabs and creating American citizens. What if key national fantasies turn on the translation of Arabo- Islamic referents into Ameri-can cultural property? What if references to the Arab world are integral to the mediation between citizen and nation? What if one of the basic

Introduction 5

discursive articulations connecting, as well as dividing, the American citizen and his or her foreign “other” is representations of the Arab? What can nineteenth- century American literature reveal to us about the con-tinuing use of the image of the Arab to unify the “political space” of the American nation? What affect do images of the Arab conjure, and how is that affect related to the creation of American identity?

Questions such as these treat literature as a significant mediator of national fantasy. The aesthetics literature promotes are a window into both the effort to unite the individual citizen to the dominant values of the national culture and the effort to challenge and reconstitute those val-ues. Nineteenth- century American writers who traded in Orientalism, regardless of their personal politics or individual relationship to struc-tures of power, produced an archive of imagery that attests to the Ameri-can public’s taste for representations of Arabs and Islam: their taste for the arabesque. American Arabesque examines this taste for the Arab not only to provide evidence of literature’s capacity to normalize imperialist, colonialist, and racist values but also to exercise the critic’s right to decon-struct and reconstruct those values from multiple and often historically occluded perspectives. In this sense, the literary critic engages in forms of translation and retranslation, asserting his or her agency in relation to an archive that has many voices, as well as many silences.

Wai Chee Dimock, in her book Through Other Continents, demon-strates how the scope of American Studies is broadened when American literature is read comparatively and across “deep time.”9 I would suggest that while these comparative approaches reveal cultural connections worth exploring, they also divulge the misappropriations that more often than not define American literary representations of ostensibly foreign cultures. I am interested in fleshing out cultural continua lurk-ing within American representations of the Arab, but I acknowledge that cultural exchange is characterized by definitional co- option and seizure as much as it is by reciprocity and mutuality. When a word is borrowed, it is often never returned or, more likely, returned in a radically altered condition. To fully appreciate the stakes in the act of borrowing, it is necessary to understand the context out of which something was taken. The “possibilities for survival, narration, and understanding” emerge when the image of the Arab in American literature is reconnected with the cultural contexts from which it was wrested. The goal is not to sal-vage the pure products of any language or culture but rather to watch them as they go wild.

6 Introduction

Approaches to literary and linguistic exchange such as Dimock’s “deep time” or Homi Bhabha’s “hybridity” celebrate cross- cultural mis-cegenation, misinterpretation, and misappropriation as signs of a trium-phant multiculturalism and evidence of practices of marginal resistance to master narratives of the nation. The often unabashed embrace of the contaminated products of cultural translation, however, is usefully bal-anced against other, more conservative views of cultural identity. These other voices point to the epistemic violence the Moroccan critic Abdelfat-tah Kilito argues is the condition of all translation. In his book Thou Shalt Not Speak My Tongue, Kilito discusses the Arabic notion of adab (أدب), which refers to both “good manners” and “literature.” After cultivating sensitivity for adab’s range of meaning, Kilito points his reader to the expression “we are all guests of language.” Kilito uses the idea of the guest and its intertwining senses in Arabic of chivalric and literary civility to make a stunning admission: “one day I realized I dislike having foreign-ers speak my language.”10 It is not only that a history of colonialism and cultural hegemony in North Africa has revealed Western Orientalists to be rude guests. It is not only the humiliating reversal whereby Arab writ-ers in the era of Ibn Khaldun could expect everyone else to learn Arabic in order to be considered literate, but Arabs in the contemporary world are compelled to learn other languages in order to be considered literate.11 In hearing Arabic on the tongue of foreigners, Kilito is struck with the fear that he may lose his language to foreigners, that he may be robbed of his cultural identity. Kilito’s book addresses a history of translation that is not one of cultural exchange but rather of warfare. The stakes in translation, then, are high— the extinction of that which makes Arabs unique (Arabic) or, at the very least, the occupation of the Arabic language by foreigners. Kilito reminds us that language, like physical space, can be the victim of colonialism.

By focusing on both American and Arab literary traditions, I mark the epistemic violence that is the source of Kilito’s anxiety and cultivate an appreciation for the original meanings of Arabic terms. But origins, of course, are disappearing points, and words are always undergoing defi-nitional transformations. In this sense, Arab phrases, words, and terms borrowed by American writers are not properly any culture’s property. Tracking a word’s transformation over time and/or space is the point, as well as a path that connects cultural traditions that are too often separated by prejudices of discipline, ideology, or language. The result is a study that uses the dynamics of translation to interpret the national fantasies that

Introduction 7

American literature perpetuates and to highlight the stakes inherent in forming national identities through figurative representation.

The Persian scholar Abd al- Qahir al- Jurjani, in his eleventh- century treatise on rhetoric, Asrar al- Balagha (البألغة -The Secrets of Elo ;اسرار quence), introduces Arabic’s first qualitative classification of figurative language (مجاز/majaaz).12 Differentiating simile from metaphor and sev-eral types of metaphoric comparison from one another, al- Jurjani stresses the importance of context, both linguistic and nonlinguistic, to under-standing the expressive power of a word. Al- Jurjani distinguished him-self from his predecessors in the field by creating a method that focuses not on what a figure is but rather on what a figure does to create vari-ous modes of meaning.13 Majaaz, al- Jurjani argues, occurs when a word references something other than what it was coined to mean. This sec-ond, or nonliteral, meaning arises out of a perceptual connection that the reader/listener recognizes between the two denotations of the word. The most sophisticated majaaz allow words to mean two different things at the same time. Literary tropes, in other words, involve a temporary trans-fer of meaning, or what al- Jurjani refers to as a “borrowing.” A person’s delight in these borrowings increases proportionally to the difference between the two objects brought together. Discussing a form of abstract comparison known as tamtheel (متثيل), al- Jurjani suggests that figurative language brings “a harmony to the unharmonious as if shortening the dis-tance between East and West, making opposites agree, and uniting life and death, fire and water.”14

A brief introduction to Islamic literary hermeneutics contextualizes al- Jurjani’s approach to figurative language. The practice of Islamic literary hermeneutics grows out of the need to understand ambiguous Qur’anic passages known as mutashaabih (متشابه), a term derived from the root شبه, suggesting similarity. The difficulty with interpreting mutashaabih is not only that they lend themselves to more than one similar meaning. It is also that, as some Islamic scholars argue, the literal sense of these pas-sages is not the same as their real message.15 The possibility, as well as the danger, of interpreting mutashaabih verses is referenced in the Qur’an:

He sent down to you this scripture, containing straightforward verses— which constitute the essence of the scripture— as well as multiple- meaning or allegorical verses (mutashaabih). Those who harbor doubts in their hearts will pursue the multiple- meaning verses to create confusion, and to extricate a certain meaning. None knows the true meaning thereof except

8 Introduction

GOD and those well founded in knowledge. They say, “We believe in this— all of it comes from our Lord.” Only those who possess intelligence will take heed. (3:7)16

Understood by some Islamic scholars as an implicit invitation to decipher mutashaabih, the passage gave impetus to the practice of taa’weel (تأويل), or figurative interpretation. Taa’weel is the act of bringing a word back to its origin or archetype in order to reveal a verse’s “true” meaning.17 In a treatise that extends Islamic hermeneutic principles to pre- Islamic Arab poetry and literature in general, al- Jurjani argues that interpreting figu-rative language reveals the secret affinities in the world and synthesizes apparent opposites. This aesthetic observation has an essential religious connotation for al- Jurjani. Majaaz exercises Arabic language’s sacred power. Figurative language, in al- Jurjani’s assessment, is a vehicle of rev-elation that confirms the Islamic creed of unity.

Al- Jurjani wrote in a historical moment when debates over figurative language and the legitimacy of the exegetical method known as taa’weel divided Islamic intellectuals into groups roughly associated with Rational-ism on the one hand and Traditionalism on the other.18 The Aristotelian- influenced speculative tendencies of the Rationalists opened sacred scrip-ture to nonliteral interpretation and contrasted with the literalist bent of the Traditionalists. One need not understand the fine points of difference between the mutakallimun and the muhaddithun, or between Mut’azillite epistemology and Ash’arite theology, to recognize why debates between Rationalists and Traditionalists often devolved into the question of divine anthropomorphism.19 A majority of Qur’anic verses are categorized as muhkam (ُمْحَكم), meaning firm or strong, that is, clear in meaning. But of the approximately two hundred verses considered mutashaabih, many attribute hands, eyes, ears, or a face to Allah. If God is indeed distinct from that which he created and is inimitable, as the Qur’an repeatedly states, and if the Qur’an is the revealed word of God, then how are the Qur’anic metaphors that give Allah human attributes to be interpreted?20 Are these metaphors meant to be interpreted literally as truth (حقيقة/haqe-eqa) or figuratively (majaaz)?21

Rather than placing figurative language in opposition to truth, al- Jurjani creates a system that divides meaning into what is intellectually verifiable and what is an imaginative conceit: ma’ani ‘aqiliyya (rational meaning) and ma’ani takhiliyya (imaginative meaning). By categorizing majaaz in relation to literal meaning rather than in opposition to truth,

Introduction 9

al- Jurjani presents figurative language not as inappropriate or false but as uttered with the purpose of making a comparison.22 Taking al- Jurjani as an impetus, American Arabesque uses figurative language not only to examine the relationships between Arab and American culture and secu-lar and sacred discourses on identity but also to probe how the literary imaginary structures the real material experiences of concrete individu-als. In this sense, I approach American arabesques as a form of poesis, figurative constructions that create new subjectivities and subject experi-ences of the world by creating new words, images, and perceptions.

In the past thirty years of scholarship on Western literature’s relation-ship to the East, the displacing power of figurative language has received far more attention than has its capacity to create connections. Beginning with Orientalism, there has been an emphasis in postcolonial criticism on analyzing how Western representations of the East replace the material Orient in favor of an Oriental imaginary that has far more to say about Western fantasies of difference than any reality of the East. Western rep-resentations of the East that work to incorporate Oriental cultural refer-ences and even Oriental languages into the idioms of democratic, progres-sive, and modern identity have only recently begun to receive the atten-tion of scholars.23 In the field of American Studies, Timothy Marr’s The Cultural Roots of American Islamicism makes the convincing argument that “Americans have long pressed orientalist images of Islam into domes-tic service as a means to globalize the authority of the cultural power of the United States.”24 American Arabesque complements Marr’s research on the absorption of Orientalist references into the language of American identity, but it is fundamentally a study of a different kind.

Within the larger envelope of American Orientalism, discrete dis-courses exist for the figure of the Turk, the Moor, the Muslim, the Bed-ouin, and the Arab. In Barbary captivity narratives and Near East travel narratives, distinctions between Turks and Bedouins, as well as between Arabs and Moors, are central to understanding what is at stake in the comparisons American writers make between the United States and the Arabo- Islamic world. Furthermore, the pervasive romantic appeal of the Bedouin figure in nineteenth- century American literature is based pre-cisely on the figure’s pre- Islamic qualities and the connections many writ-ers made between Bedouins’ “primitive” life and the life of Abraham. But these distinctions between Muslim ethnicities, as well as between Islamic culture and Bedouin Arab culture, are significant not only because they speak to the creation of American racial maps but also because the first

10 Introduction

group of actual Arab immigrants to America were predominantly Chris-tian. To fully appreciate the Orientalist narratives that these immigrants were both exploiting and revising, it is necessary to understand the nuances of that narrative and the ethnic, geographical, and cultural dis-tinctions made in it. Tracking the conflations and separations of Arab, Muslim, Moor, Turk, and Bedouin in American discourse reveals the logic inherent in cross- cultural comparisons, such as between Bedouin and Native Indian, as well as the logic informing the creation of cross- cultural figures such as the American Moor.

Since the 1990s, a number of exemplary studies of American versions of Orientalism have been published, including Fuad Sha’ban’s Islam and Arabs in Early American Thought, Malini Johar Schueller’s U.S. Orien-talisms, Scott Trafton’s Egypt Land, Hilton Obenzinger’s American Pal-estine, and Brian T. Edwards’s Morocco Bound.25 None of these books has dealt with the specificity of the image of the Arab, and most importantly none has dealt directly with the Arabic language and Arabic- language writers. If American Studies is truly to take its much- advertised global turn, its scholars must cultivate an appreciation for the languages from which foreign references are pilfered. It is only by developing this intercultural perspective that we can fully appreciate the dynamics of absorbing “foreign” and/or “exotic” references into American contexts. In order to reinvigorate a dialogue between American culture and Arab culture that was initiated in nineteenth- century Orientalist discourse, it is necessary to follow al- Jurjani’s advice and pay close attention to how borrowed words maintain two simultaneous, and often opposed, meanings.

The methodological decision to include analyses of Arabic- language texts in my chapters allows me to explore the relationship between the fig-urative Arabs and/or Muslims of American Orientalist discourse and the Arabs and/or Muslims who used Orientalist discourses to figure them-selves as Americans. It is a critical practice that acknowledges the limits of the tradition it is building on by both excoriating the terms that discourse employed to know the “other” and creating a new hermeneutic methodol-ogy of retrieving knowledge— knowledge that is not one culture’s property or another’s but rather is an overlapping and at times shared imaginary. As a generation of inquiry into Orientalism has taught us, there are multi-ple Orients as well as multiple Wests, often simultaneously conjured in the same figure. Our critical approach to these respective concepts must be as supple as al- Jurjani’s approach to majaaz. It must be an approach that

Introduction 11

allows us to recognize, through the figure, a “shortening [of] the distance between East and West.”

Figures of the Arab and Definitions of America

Two historical anecdotes serve as bookends for American Arabesque. The first takes place on the coast of North Africa at the turn of the nineteenth century. The second takes place in a U.S. court room at the beginning of the twentieth century. The story of the Mameluke sword focuses on the translation of an Arabo- Islamic referent into a key iteration of American national identity, the Marine hymn. The story of the Dow case examines how the first “Arab” immigrants to the United States narrated themselves into American citizens. These two moments delineate the historical sweep of American Arabesque. They also model two theoretical approaches to understanding arabesque representation: intercultural translation and intracultural translation. The former focuses on the use of the Arab and/or Muslim figure from elsewhere to create national imaginaries; the latter focuses on Arabs and Muslims in America and their creation of counter national imaginaries. Both types of translation are intimately connected to the racial politics of American citizenship.

On April 27, 1805, the exiled ruler of Tripoli, Hamet Karamanelli, pre-sented Lieutenant Neville Presley O’Bannon with a jeweled Mameluke sword in acknowledgment of the successful bayonet charge the young Marine from Virginia had led earlier that day against the fortified city of Derne. The ceremony took place on North Africa’s Mediterranean coast, and the larger event it commemorated was eventually incorporated into the Marine hymn as a testament to the transatlantic reach of U.S. military power and political influence: “from the halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli.” Soon after the sword ceremony, O’Bannon raised the Stars and Stripes over Derne. The event marked a turning point in the United States’ first extracontinental military venture and, as Marine lore holds, the first time the American flag had been carried and planted on the other side of the Atlantic. To this day, commissioned officers of the Marine Corp carry a replica of the same Mameluke sword that Hamet Karamanelli presented to O’Bannon on the shores of Tripoli.

The sword exchange still resonates in the American national memory as a heroic first chapter in the country’s global crusade against despotism and its enduring commitment to spreading democracy to the far corners

12 Introduction

of the earth.26 In other words, the Mameluke sword and the event it com-memorates have been translated into an American national fantasy. Ber-lant, describing her definition of national fantasy, explains, “I mean to designate how national culture becomes local— through the images, nar-ratives, monuments, and sites that circulate through personal/collective consciousness.”27 The Marine hymn is one of these transformative narra-tives, and in it Barbary becomes a productive site of American national identity. It is in this “fantasy” sense that the invocation “to the shores of Tripoli” uses affect to bind the individual citizen to the collective notion of national honor, integrity, and military power. But what if we were to read this national fantasy dialectically through the filter of Arab history and the Arabic language? What if we took a philological approach to the hymn’s translation of the Mameluke sword into the Marine sword?

O’Bannon was a member of a small expeditionary force of eight Marines, a hundred or so European fortune fighters, and several hundred Bedouin Arabs. The group had been led across the Libyan Desert by an intrepid Rev-olutionary and Indian War veteran from Massachusetts, General William Eaton. Eaton’s covert mission was to overthrow the acting ruler of Trip-oli, Yusuf Karamanelli, and to replace him with his more pliable brother Hamet. The ultimate goal was to free the hundreds of American citizens held in Tripoli’s slave prisons and rid the U.S. government of the need to pay tribute to a piratical state. In a matter of days after Hamet had handed the Mameluke sword to Lt. O’Bannon in Derne, his brother Yusuf precipitously began negotiations for peace with the United States. Far from being “chas-tised for his temerity” (as Eaton preferred) or removed from his position of tyrannical power, Yusuf ultimately signed a treaty that established him as legitimate ruler of Tripoli in the eyes of the U.S. government.28 This treaty contained a secret proviso banishing Hamet from Tripoli and assuring his removal by securing his immediate family as Yusuf’s hostages.29

In the years that followed the triumphant sword exchange in Derne, Eaton and Hamet remained connected through the written word. Hamet wrote many letters to the U.S. Senate complaining of his exile on an obscure Mediterranean island, his penury, and the unpaid debt that America owed him. When informed of the treaty negotiations that ulti-mately made Hamet an exile, Eaton, still occupying the Derne camp, wrote in distress to Samuel Barron, the commander in chief of U.S. forces in the Mediterranean. “Could I have apprehended this result of my exer-tions,” Eaton complained, “certainly no consideration would have pre-vailed on me to have taken an agency in a tragedy so manifestly fraught

Introduction 13

with intrigue; so wounding to human feelings; and as I must view it, so degrading to our national honor.”30 In Eaton’s view, the shores of Tripoli do not consolidate the righteous and masculine national subjectivity that so often affectively attaches itself to the Marine hymn. Instead Eaton narrates the United States’ surreptitious retreat in the dead of night from Derne as “unmanly.”31 As concerns Hamet, Eaton remarks in his journal, “He falls from the most flattering prospects of a kingdom, to beggary!”32

How do we interpret the results of the U.S. military’s actions in Bar-bary? Was it victory or defeat? Was it honorable or dishonorable? Track-ing what Hamet’s Mameluke sword signifies in both American and Arab cultural traditions provides a global perspective on the phrase “to the shores of Tripoli.” Paying attention to the dynamics of translation, in other words, disturbs the exceptionalist national fantasy that the Marine hymn invokes. What emerges in its place is a narrative on American iden-tity in which belonging and alienation (enfranchisement and disenfran-chisement) are intrinsically bound together.

Mameluke refers to the organized bodies of slave soldiers employed by various Islamic armies from as early as the ninth century. The members of this corps, captured or bartered during their childhoods and raised as military orphans, eventually gave birth to two Egyptian dynasties. The first dynasty had consolidated its control over the state by the end of the thirteenth century. This generation of Mamelukes replaced the Arabo- Islamic caliphate with a form of military rule that placed power in the hands of central Asian, Turkish, Kurdish, and Caucasian soldiers. The Mamelukes’ dynastic power originated in seizure, and their political aim was self- interestedly to perpetuate that power through clientage. To the Arab historian Ibn Khaldun, the advent of Mameluke control of Egypt is a signal event in the decay of the Arab asabiyya (group loyalty) that cre-ated the pinnacles of Arabo- Islamic civilization, the Ummayad and Abas-sid Caliphates.33 Ibn Khaldun argues that the Mameluke dynasty marks a historical shift whereby Arabs will no longer be rulers of the Islamic umma (community) but rather will become the ruled. Seen through the perspective of Ibn Khaldun’s theory of history, the Mamelukes revived an older form of natural kingship (mulk) but changed the terms of loy-alty from tribal/ethnic bonds to military bonds.34 By the beginning of the nineteenth century, the second Mameluke dynasty had taken control of Egypt, following the same policies as its original Mameluke predecessors.

The word mameluke is derived from the Arabic verb malaka (ملك), “to take in possession, seize, take over, acquire, lay hands (on); to dominate,

14 Introduction

control, be master (of).”35 A mameluke is a slave or possession of some-one, but a malik (derived from the same verbal root) is a king, and mulk is something that Ibn Khaldun theorized as natural kingship. In practice, the Mameluke dynasty combined these seemingly opposed states of being: they were both slaves and kings, both victims and administrators of impe-rialism. No man could become a Mameluke ruler who had not first been a Mameluke slave. The janissary body of the Mamelukes was not hereditary and theoretically could only be refreshed with new orphans. The Mam-eluke system meant that a boy seized on a military raid into the Caucus Mountains and raised as a slave could become the ruler of an Egyptian population to which he was not ethnically, racially, or culturally attached.

The transformation of the Mameluke sword into the U.S. Marine sword entails an act of transvaluation whereby an Arabo- Islamic sym-bol of slavery, imperialism, and dynastic hegemony becomes a symbolic expression of America’s commitment to freedom and democracy. And yet O’Bannon himself hailed from a state in which slavery was legal, and the larger conflict in North Africa that came to be known as the Tripoli War gave birth to the U.S. Navy, impetus to the U.S. Marines, and still provides a quilting point for subsequent narratives of the United States’ extracontinental military interventions in the name of overthrowing tyrants rather than appeasing them. The other narrative, the narrative that suggests the United States’ own history of slavery, hegemony, and imperial aggression, remains as a ghostly complement to the New World symbol that American historiography was to fashion out of Hamet’s Mameluke sword.

The proceedings from the court marshal of an American sailor aboard a ship sent to the Barbary Coast during the War with Tripoli provides a tell-ing example of the gap many Federal- era Americans felt existed between the promise of revolutionary freedom and the reality of continued Ameri-can bondage, between the affect of national fantasy and the lived experi-ence of those still occluded from the values the national fantasy promoted. On June 23, 1804, Robert Quinn, the president of the sailors aboard the U.S. frigate President, was summoned to the bar at Hampton Roads for the crime of mutiny. The evidence against Quinn consisted of a letter he had written to Commodore Samuel Baron, commander of the U.S. naval squadron deployed to the Mediterranean to free American slaves held captive in Barbary prisons. The letter lists a series of complaints the com-mon sailors had with their treatment and meal allowances. In the letter, Quinn uses the pointed terms of revolutionary rhetoric:

Introduction 15

Tyranny is the beginning of all mischief and is generally attended with bad things at the latter end. Any Commodore or captain that had the least feel-ing or thought would not suffer this hard usage it is almost impossible for us to live. . . . Some of our friends in America and other parts shall know of this shortly and in time we hope to get redress— death is always superior to slavery— we remain your unhappy slaves.36

Quinn received cold satisfaction for his invocation of the language of the Revolutionary War and his appeal to its metaphors of freedom. He was sentenced to have his eyebrows shaved and to be branded on the forehead with the word “Mutiny.” He also received 326 lashes equally apportioned among the crew of the different ships of the squadron. Eaton was one of the judges. Quinn and his fellow sailors had deployed to Barbary aboard an American ship rhetorically positioned as fighting tyranny and freeing slaves. Yet it is American commodores and captains he accuses of tyranny and slave driving.

The Marine hymn subsumes contradictions between the American rhetoric of liberty and the American history of bondage by appealing to the national fantasy of America’s historical commitment to freedom. In other words, the hymn reinterprets the Mameluke sword, translat-ing it into an affective iteration of American national identity. To put the Marine sword in dialectic with the Mameluke sword is to think through exchanges between America and the Arab world not only in terms of martial conquest but also in terms of intercultural translation. It is to reconstruct our understanding of national symbols with an eye toward their etiology. The cause of the sword exchange commemorated in the Marine hymn was the installation of Hamet Karamanelli, with the aid of the United States, as ruler of Tripoli. The result of the sword exchange was his disenfranchisement, exile, and alienation. The larger cause that had brought U.S. Marines to the shores of Tripoli was the enslavement of American citizens, who had been promised life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness by the Declaration of Independence. As white slaves in North Africa, as well as the white seamen sent to rescue them, were well aware, these universal rights were far from universally applied in their home country.

The displacements involved in aestheticizing and refiguring Arab his-tory, Arabo- Islamic expression, and the Arabic language as American cultural property create American arabesques. I categorize American representations of the Arab as arabesques because I recognize the fantasy

16 Introduction

quotient with which these images are imbued, but I am also arguing against dismissing them as merely “bad” or inaccurate representations. American arabesques define a spectrum of relations between American culture and Arab culture that have yet to be explored. Arabesque repre-sentation displaces the physical, material world in favor of an imagined world and imagined relations. The imaginaries created through ara-besques speak to idealized visions of America, but they also speak to the real ideological, social, and racial fissures in the nation that must be ameliorated through imaginary projection. These imaginary projections, in turn, create new American identities. I approach the literary history of representing the Arab as a key that unlocks a larger story about how figures of the Arab and tropes of Arabness are used to construct defini-tions of American national identity, to mediate American racial differ-ences, and to control the meaning of citizenship in the American context. But arabesques are not only figures of displacement; they are also figures of emplacement, particularly for groups within the United States that felt disenfranchised by nineteenth- century models of American citizenship.

A 1915 Fourth Circuit Court appeals trial, Dow v. United States, decided the question of Syrian race in the eyes of American law.37 Guided by the Dillingham Report of the Immigration Commission, the Fourth Circuit appellate judge ruled that Syrian immigrants from the African side of the Mediterranean were “of mixed Syrian, Arabian, and even Jewish blood.” Instead of being labeled Turkish and thus being subject to Asian immigra-tion quotas, Syrian migrants to America were classified as “belong[ing] to the Semitic branch of the Caucasian race. Thus widely differing from their rulers, the Turks.”38 The decision ushered Syrian immigrants into the inner sanctum of American citizenship, even as it tacitly acknowledged the figurative nature of a racial category constructed from labile ethnic, national, and religious delineations. Legally recognized as white, Syrians became part of the American family, and the racial category of Arab dis-appeared from official tabulation.

The privileged place opened up for Syrians in the American legal con-ception of citizenship at the beginning of the twentieth century had its rhetorical genesis in nineteenth- century metaphors and figurations of Arabness. Literary tropes of Arabness not only influenced juridical defini-tions of American citizenship but also literally facilitated the transition of Arab immigrants from foreigner to American. The creation of very real American citizens out of Arab migrants, in other words, was abetted by fiction and figural representation. The Dow ruling legally sanctioned

Introduction 17

a distinction between Arab and Turk that American literature had been defining figuratively for over a century. Furthermore, by classifying Syr-ian ethnicity as a “Semitic branch of the Caucasian race,” U.S. law codi-fied the imaginative conduit between darkness and whiteness, as well as between foreignness and American citizenship, that tropes of Arabness had provided throughout the nineteenth century.

As the Dow case attests, the term Arab signified a mutable category in America, one that needed juridical policing. The definitions of Arab circu-lating in America contemporary with the Dow decision include, “A home-less child or street urchin”; “A Jew”; “A people of mixed breed, partially Indian”; “Any dark complexioned person, esp. if belonging to a group tra-ditionally considered to be somewhat primitive in emotional matters; spec. a Jew or a Turk”; and “A huckster or street vendor, esp. those who posses a Central European or Middle Eastern cast of countenance.”39 The range of vernacular meaning for the word Arab meant that Syrian migrants encountered an array of potential identities— immigrant, Indian, Jew, Turk, primitive, Middle Eastern, Central European, mixed breed. These living Syrian individuals inherited imaginary subject positions that were engendered by arabesque representation. In negotiating their relationship to these subject positions, the Syrian migrants negotiated their relation to an American national symbolic that had already created a place for them in the national fantasy.

If one type of American arabesque involves the translation (often vio-lent) of Arab and/or Arabo- Islamic words, images, spaces, and objects into American culture, another type involves the creation of alternative American identities based on “- esquing” these translations. This sec-ond type of arabesque is a conscious strategy of self- representation that reads a predominantly white American discourse on Arabo- Islamic cul-ture against the grain. These arabesques blend not only the Arab and the American but also the real and the fictional. The figurative Arabs that appear on the pages of nineteenth- century American texts replace real Arabs in the American cultural imaginary and exert a representational pressure on the literal “Arabs” who eventually appear on American shores at the end of the nineteenth century. But it is precisely by playing into the existing American discourse on Arab identity that Syrian migrants to America made themselves “white.” Exchanging their Syrian ethnicity for whiteness, these first- generation migrants demonstrate how Muslims and Arabs in turn- of- the- twentieth- century America readapted Orientalist discourses to their own purposes.

18 Introduction

The physical arabesque pattern has acted as a medium of transfer-ence between cultures for centuries, connecting “Oriental” art and “Western” art through its tendril motifs (see figure 2).40 The term arabesque, in turn, captures the way nineteenth- century American romanticism not only blended the real and the fantastic to reimagine the nation and the self but also borrowed its fantasies of national and personal difference directly from other cultural traditions. However, the term arabesque does not exist in Arabic. Sometime around the beginning of the seventeenth century, the word appears in the Eng-lish language, by way of the French arabesque, which is borrowed from the Italian arabesco, which in turn is derived from the Latin Arabus. The “Arabian ornamental design” that the word arabesque references had been a source of European fascination since antiquity, exerting a particular inf luence on Renaissance artists as diversely situated as Albrecht Dürer and Raphael. Improvising on the “Arabian” design pat-tern, European artists over the ages created the related styles of the Romanesque, the Moresque, and the grotesque.

The history of intercultural translation, misinterpretation, and pro-jection attached to the figure of the arabesque provides the impetus for the title of this book. American Arabesque tracks the exchange between American culture and Arabo- Islamic culture through five figures: the cap-tive, the indigene, the arabesque, the Moor, and the migrant. Each of these figures is an arabesque in the sense that they (a) enact romantic engage-ments with the Arab world, (b) blend two languages of identity (American and Arab), and (c) create representative patterns of mirroring/doubling. An analysis of these arabesques illuminates the role that references to Arab and Arabo- Islamic culture play in shaping the contours of American belonging and ultimately the content of the U.S. national imaginary.

A Pattern of Representation

Chapter 1 focuses on the figure of the captive and argues for the discur-sive importance of North African slavery to the articulation of Federal- era American national identity. American captives in Barbary slavery extended Revolutionary War narratives on bondage and freedom to make arguments for their country’s obligation to ransom them. In the process of claiming their own constitutional rights, these predominantly white, working- class sailors used Barbary types to establish comparisons

Introduction 19

between themselves and the disenfranchised in America’s nascent democ-racy. Filtered largely through the experiences of James Leander Cathcart (Revolutionary War veteran, Barbary slave, U.S. diplomat, and student of Arabic, Turkish, and Lingua Franca), chapter 1 examines how Barbary was used rhetorically to interrogate the meaning and limitation of untested terms such as democracy, equality, liberty, and patriotism in the Ameri-can context. The result is not only the importation of Barbary types into American racial maps but also the creation of cross- cultural comparisons that can be mined, retrospectively, for evidence of the nation’s nascent multicultural consciousness.

Figure 2. Arabesque filler ornament from a circular wall inset in the house of the fourteenth- century Emir Bardak in Cairo and Greek “translation.” From Alois Riegl, Problems of Style, excerpted in Jules Bourgoin, Précis de l’art arabe et matériaux pour servir à l’histoire, à la théorie, et à la technique des arts de l’Orient musulman, 2 vols. (Paris, 1892), part 1, pl. 32.

20 Introduction

John Foss, a sailor captured by the Regency of Algiers in 1793, demon-strates the relationships between America and North Africa that Barbary captivity narratives established for their readers.

The Turks are a well- built robust people, their complexion not unlike Americans, tho’ somewhat larger, but their dress, and long beards, make them more like monsters than human beings.

The Cologlies are somewhat less in stature than the Turks, and are of a more tawny complexion.

The Moors are generally a tall, thin, spare set of people, not much inclining to fat, and of a very dark complexion, much like the Indians of North America.

The Arabs, or Arabians, are of a much darker complexion than the Moors, being darker than Mulattoes. They are much less in stature than the Moors, being the smallest people I ever saw. . . . As they are not allowed to trade in any mercantile line, nor even learn any mechanic art, they are obliged to be drudges to their superiors.41

In Foss’s proto- ethnographic summary, four distinct inhabitants of the Algerian space are strung together as contiguous links in a cultural chain of being, each one’s identity being determined in relation not only to the previous one but also to a racial identity recognizable from the American context.42 Foss creates an arabesque pattern of representa-tion by using Barbary to mirror American racial relations back to his readers. He employs similarity to establish the naturalness of America’s racial hierarchies and reversal to establish America’s cultural difference from Barbarous Africa. Thus, the Turks are “not unlike Americans” in racial complexion but also are “more like monsters than human beings” in their cultural habits (visible on the level of clothes and grooming). The Turk is a white American in reverse, monstrous instead of civilized, despotic instead of democratic, and barbarous instead of enlightened. Whiteness appears in Foss’s Barbary racial grid as a universal marker of privilege and power, but Americanness remains a distinct and excep-tional cultural identity for his reader, lest the comparison between Turk and American suggest other uncomfortable equivalencies.

However, the order and categorical differences Foss is attempting to establish through his grid of Barbary is in fact undermined by the latent equivalencies in his chart. The difference between Turk and American has to be quickly established because of the immediate similarity between the

Introduction 21

two. Perhaps even more disruptive to Foss’s order than the Turk is the fig-ure of the Cologlie, a hybrid entity that has no analogue in Foss’s Amer-ican racial mirror. The Cologlie, a child of a garrisoned Turkish soldier and a local Algerian woman, has no American double precisely because he or she represents the possibility of racial hybridity being integrated into an essentialist chain of being. Most tellingly, though, is Foss’s categoriza-tion of Arab identity. Foss presents an Arab figure that is “much darker complexion than the Moors, being darker than Mulattoes.” Yet the term Arab was applied in other contexts by other Barbary captives to a range of different American racial equivalents. Foss does not merely replicate the Barbary racial hierarchy; he translates it according to his particular conception of racial order.

The cross- cultural comparisons engendered by Barbary captivity reflect the national identity anxieties of the Federal era, anxieties centered on the meaning of democracy and the need to establish order, specifically racial order, out of revolution. In the decades that followed, tropes of the Arab were adapted by other American writers to new questions about American democracy and its limits. In the mid- nineteenth century, the genre of the Near Eastern travel narrative came into market prominence at the exact same time that the U.S. government was dramatically expanding its con-tinental territory. In these narratives, the American frontier is mirrored in the Arabian Desert, and the politics of Indian removal are played out symbolically through travelers’ ruminations about disappearing Bedou-ins. John Lloyd Stephens, the first American to write a Near Eastern travel narrative, demonstrates how representations of the Near East worked to rhetorically establish America’s exceptional mandate. About midway through his account, Stephens describes the curse on Biblical Edom and Biblical Esau.

Standing near the Elanitic branch of the Red Sea, the doomed and accursed land lay stretched out before me, the theatre of awful visitations and their more awful fulfillment; given to Esau as being the fatness of the earth, but now a barren waste, a picture of death, an eternal monument of the wrath of an offended God, and a fearful witness to the truth of the words spoken by his prophets.43

Stephens narrates his path across the Arabian Desert with intentional rhe-torical echoes of an earlier Anglo- American settler colonialism that fig-ured white Americans as New Israelites with a covenantal relationship to

22 Introduction

American soil. By emphasizing the literal nature of the Old Testament’s prophecies and their fulfillment in the ancient world, Stephens indexes the fulfillment narrative of New Testament– inspired Protestant interpretations of America as the New Israel. If the “curse” on Esau was fulfilled in Edom, it meant that by logical extension the chosen status of the Israelites would also be literally realized. Interpretations such as these were inspired by a Pauline approach to the Old Testament as a prefiguration of the New Testa-ment and its history of salvation. Rejecting allegorical interpretation, Paul’s epistles insisted on literal historical interpretations of both Old Testament figure and New Testament fulfillment. The fulfillment of the prophecy of Edom’s destruction had implications for the New Israel of America. For the many Americans who believed in chiliastic rhetoric, the salvation and cho-sen status of the New Israel was confirmed in the plight of the figurative Esaus (i.e., Bedouins) located in the sands of Arabia Petraea.

Stephens’s use of the Arab world to make arguments about American destiny creates an arabesque representation. His description of Edom establishes the naturalness of America’s westward expansion through similarity and the uniqueness of America’s exceptional mandate through reversal. The disappearance of primitive man in the face of civilized advance was a universal phenomenon, these travel narratives implied, visible in the Arabian Desert as well as on the American frontier. But America’s colonial advance into its continental hinterland was differen-tiated from Ottoman colonialism, and American Manifest Destiny was distinguished from historical examples of imperial hubris through rever-sal. Whereas Edom is cursed, America is chosen, as evident in the Biblical story of Jacob and Esau being played out on America’s own frontier.

Chapter 2 turns its attention to the figure of the indigene as it relates to the question of nativity and ownership in the American context. The writers detailed in chapter 2 are privileged rather than enslaved, mov-ing relatively freely through Near Eastern deserts, cities, and ruins rather than being trapped in North African prisons and speaking to a domestic audience that is not as mindful of the question of American Revolution as they are of the question of American Empire. Yet the Near Eastern travel narrative, as the Barbary captivity narrative did more than a generation earlier, broached central questions of American national identity through representations of Ottoman colonial relations and Arabo- Islamic cultural stratifications. The Arab figure that reverberates most poignantly with the midcentury American national imaginary is the Bedouin. Americans in the Near East justified U.S. national expansion at its continental borders

Introduction 23

by employing pentimento representations of the Bedouin through which they discussed Native Indians. These representations created complex metaphors of white American nativity.

Yet the very figurative nature of these metaphors of nativity made them unruly and subject to co- option by “nonwhites” such as Jews and Afri-can Americans. Looking closely at Erich Auerbach’s definition of figura in the context of Ibn Khaldun’s fourteenth- century definition of the Bed-ouin, chapter 2 examines the stakes in translating a foreign archetype into a domestic stereotype. Read in an intercultural context, the translation of the Arab Bedouin into the American Bedouin does something more than stabilize white nativity in America and create a national symbolic that differentiates American Empire from its historical predecessors. This translation also, simultaneously, creates cross- cultural imaginaries that allow American readers to see Andrew Jackson mirrored in the Oriental “despot” Muhammad Ali and American expansionism mirrored in the hegemonic policies of the Ottomans toward indigenous populations.

The first two chapters connect parallel strains in American Studies scholarship: the effort to situate American culture within a global con-text and the developing critique of U.S. imperialism prior to the Civil War. My own analysis of Americans’ antebellum contact with Arabo- Islamic cultures is coupled with attention to how these exotic encounters express white America’s continental imperial imagination. What I discover, though, in this Eastern contact literature, is not the monocultural ethos underlying racial nationalism or the ruthless democracy of American imperial citizenship but rather textual moments when American citi-zens confront colonialism in America.44 Placing narrative instantiations of national identity in the international contexts registered by both Bar-bary captivity narratives and Near Eastern travel narratives, in fact, dis-turbs the discourse of white privilege that several recent American Studies scholars have explored.45

The arabesques on which I concentrate in the first two chapters directly reference Arab culture. Edgar Allan Poe’s arabesques refer not to the Arab world but rather to a romantic style the writer cultivates in an attempt to distinguish himself in a crowded literary marketplace. Washington Irving, for example, had dubbed his own stories “arabesque” before Poe published Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque. However, though both Poe and Irving shared a fondness for the exotic and a propensity to invoke the supernatural in their short stories, the term arabesque held a different valence in their respective aesthetic sensibilities. Irving certainly had read

24 Introduction

more about Islam, Arabs, and Arabo- Islamic history than Poe had. He had published a biography of the Prophet Muhammad, as well as several histo-ries of the Moors in Spain. He had even, unlike Poe, traveled to Andalusia and come in firsthand contact with Arabo- Islamic culture and ruins. But it is precisely Poe’s lack of contact with primary sources and primary sites of Arabo- Islamic cultural production that makes his arabesque aesthetic so unmoored, so uniquely American. The physical arabesques in Poe’s tales index his arabesque aesthetic. This aesthetic establishes conduits between accepted binaries, ultimately collapsing dichotomies to achieve Poe’s signature modern affects of shock and terror.46 Poe’s arabesques link the theory and praxis of his romanticism, but they also translate an Arab cultural reference into an American idiom.

Poe’s use of the arabesque to establish his romantic aesthetic provides a salient example of what happens when an Arabo- Islamic referent is trans-lated out of its own cultural context and into American cultural prop-erty. At the beginning of his essay on interior décor, “The Philosophy of Furniture,” Poe insists that the ideal American domestic space should be covered by arabesque patterns “of no meaning.”47 Though Poe’s decorating advice is delivered tongue lodged in cheek, it has direct relevance to his own use of the arabesque pattern to model an art- for- art’s- sake theory of literature. Poe evacuates material Arabs and Arabo- Islamic culture from the image of the Arab, replacing the real with the figural to create his ide-alized realm of “pure fiction.” Poe’s use of the term arabesque as code for his own theory of art effectively disconnects the image of the Arab from material Arab culture. It is precisely this aesthetic “sweep[ing] aside” of the material world that William Carlos Williams identifies as Poe’s con-tribution to the creation of a national literature.48 Seen through modernist criticism, Poe’s arabesque consolidates the idea of America by presenting its unique literary voice to the world.

In chapter 3, I concentrate on the translation of the image of the Arab into a “unique” expression of American romanticism. In Poe, the figure of the Arab facilitates the experience of difference as sameness, the foreign as familiar, and the alien as domestic. In a sense, Poe cultivates the anxieties that are latent in the contact narrative’s use of the image of the Arab to establish American national, cultural, and racial difference. Poe exploits those anxieties, refining them into an aesthetic instantiation of national terror based on the potential collapse of difference. Poe’s domestication of the image of the Arab ultimately serves as an ironic acknowledgment of the impossibility of bounding a “unique” domestic national identity

Introduction 25

that is built through references to the foreign, the exotic, and the “other.” Tracking the arabesque’s movement from Arab cultural reference to uniquely American aesthetic demonstrates the role of translation in Poe’s romanticism. Retranslating Poe’s arabesque back into Arabo- Islamic cul-tural discourse, in turn, reveals resonances between Arab and American romanticism.

The design pattern that came to be called the arabesque in the West-ern world is known in Arabic as tawreeq (توريق), from the verb form of “to foliate” (ورق).W

49 Whereas Poe’s arabesque symbolizes a secular aesthetic, the tawreeq is intimately connected to sacred aesthetics. The tawreeq lends itself to poetic manifestations (ghazel) and musical manifestations (muwashshah) as well as ornamental design. Each of these tawreeq art forms strives to capture the Islamic concept of tawHeed (توحيد; unity) and to remind the viewer/listener of the oneness and utter transcendence of Allah. These theories of unicity receive especially poignant expressions in Islamic mysticism and the writings of Sufis such as Ibn Arabi. In trans-lating an Arabo- Islamic referent into an instantiation of American liter-ary nationalism, Poe not only strips the term of its original signification; he also fundamentally alters his audience’s understanding of the term’s cultural- historical significance to Muslims. Placing Poe’s arabesque in an intercultural context, however, creates the possibility for appreciating how American and Arab cultural values interanimate each other.

At the same historical moment that Poe used the arabesque figure as code for his exploration of a primal aesthetic of sensation, Arab writers such as al- Tahtawi were beginning to modernize the Arabic language itself. In Poe’s writing, the figure of the Arab indicates an emptying out of meaning from the form. In al- Tahtawi’s writing, the meanings of the rep-resentational figures of the Arabic language are being expanded to include modern political concepts such as nationalism. To Poe, the arabesque fig-ure is a sign of modernity because it has been stripped of content and only stands for itself. But to al- Tahtawi, Arab figures are keys to modernity because they demonstrate Arabo- Islamic culture’s ability to incorporate foreign concepts into a familiar idiom. Ultimately, chapter 3 uses dialec-tics to move toward an intercultural interpretation of the arabesque and its relationship to national identity politics.

The first three chapters mark a trajectory of abstraction that culminates in Poe’s arabesque, a figure that evacuates material Arabs and Arabo- Islamic culture from the image of the Arab. The birth of an indigenous form of American Islam (the Moorish Science Temple) and the nascent

26 Introduction

stirrings of an Arab American literary community (the mahjar), however, produce American arabesques that attempt to establish the material reality of Arab American and Islamic American identity. In the final two chap-ters, tropes of Arabness are reengineered to create subversive narratives of American belonging that nonetheless borrow their logic of representa-tion from mainstream national fantasies. The arabesques that come under scrutiny in these final two chapters make manifest the racial and spatial reversals latent in the arabesques examined in the first three chapters. Nineteenth- century American arabesques contain anxious explorations of a potential America, an America that is multicultural, cosmopolitan, racially diverse, and internationally contextualized. In the figures of the American Moor and the Arab migrant, these potentialities are embraced, elaborated, and discursively instantiated.

Muslim identity provided disenfranchised American citizens, such as black Americans, with a counternode to European culture and cultural hegemony. As certain black uplift leaders pointed out, the Muslim is not only victimized by history but is also a historical victor, evidenced by the prominent histories of Egyptian Empire, Meccan revelation, and Islamic conquest. The founder of the Moorish Science Temple, Noble Drew Ali, tweaked nineteenth- century white Orientalist discourses on the Moor’s in- between status to take rhetorical advantage of these counternodal pos-sibilities. Drew Ali disclaims “Negro” and white identity alike in favor of a Moorish racial identity that draws on Arabo- Islamic history, references, and icons. The fiction of Moorish ancestry allowed Drew Ali to insist on a continuum between blackness and Americanness that was literal but rhetorically difficult to establish. Placing his community in the figurative position of Moor, Drew Ali reconceived the Middle Passage in terms of black triumph, conquest, and historical tradition rather than in terms of exploitation and memory loss.

The category of Muslim created by New World Islam prophets such as Drew Ali has very little to do with Islam. Instead, early black Ameri-can Muslims were figural Muslims, modernist creations that borrowed references to the Arab and Islamic world to forge a new black American modality. Drew Ali’s national fantasy of Moorish identity spoke to the real material and psychological needs of his community in particular and the rhetorical goals of black uplift discourse more generally. But his vision was not shared by all, and his categorization of black identity as Moorish came under perpetual duress from black uplift leaders who viewed him as a rad-ical and/or a charlatan. Nevertheless, Drew Ali used the figure of the Moor

Introduction 27

to establish a counter American National Symbolic. Rewriting American historiography from the perspective of the Moor, Drew Ali rejected the elective model of national identity that the rhetoric of the Declaration of Independence had promised but never delivered on for people of color. Instead he turned toward an alternate form of nationalism, one that had resonance with the Anglo- Saxonist primordial- descent model of national identity that had justified American slavery, had driven America’s west-ward expansion, and was to inform the restrictive American immigration laws passed in the 1920s. Mirroring the way that nineteenth- century white Orientalist discourse used the Orient as a screen to project national nar-ratives and to configure New World racial hierarchies, Drew Ali used the figure of the Moor to establish a narrative of black American nativity and historical privilege.

The rhetorical reversal of a white American discourse on race is directly evident in Drew Ali’s handling of the story of Ham. “Old man Cush and his family are the first inhabitants of Africa who came from the land of Canaan,” relates Drew Ali’s Circle Seven Koran. “His father Ham and his family were second.”50 Used throughout the antebellum period by racist apologists and proslavery advocates, the Biblical story of Ham had been marshaled as a defense of slavery for many years in American discourse. Drew Ali uses the Hamitic legacy in his Koran to ground the “lost- found” nation of American blacks in a locatable space and time, one that had been stripped from them by the experience of slavery. “What your ancient fore-fathers were,” the Circle Seven Koran reads, “you are today without doubt or contradiction” (47:10). Drew Ali’s Koran specifically challenges a his-tory of American slavery, with its attendant erasure of historical memory, cultural identity, and a sense of homeland with a figure, Ham, associated with the justification of slavery. Through Ham, Drew Ali makes a direct claim on historical continuity for the African diaspora in America. Ham is just one of many North African figures that early twentieth- century black uplift leaders “- esqued” to create an aesthetics of black pride.

Chapter 4 examines the representation of Arabs, Islam, and Arabo- Islamic culture in early twentieth- century black uplift discourses. Bor-rowed from a Claude McKay poem about Morocco, the term barbaresque describes black intellectuals’ aesthetic engagement with North Africa, as well as with the narratives of African American empowerment these engagements produced. The chapter centers on the birth of the Moorish Science Temple; its founder, Drew Ali; and his New Age religious text, The Circle Seven Koran. Drew Ali’s co- option of Moorish identity, Islamic

28 Introduction

history, and Moroccan nationality is contextualized by discourses sur-rounding the New Negro and the Harlem Renaissance. In particular, chapter 4 examines W. E. B. DuBois’s and McKay’s treatments of Arabo- Islamic culture, as well as the coverage of the Moors in the black press. The chapter argues that the variations in these different writers’ representation of Arabs, Islam, and Morocco speak directly to central debates in black uplift discourse about the politics of respectability, as well as to key class divides between the talented- tenth and street- level black- empowerment movements. Barbaresques ultimately could be mobilized for either spiri-tual or secular discourses on black identity, and charting their uses in the first decades of the twentieth century reveals how intraethnic class and religious reconciliation were often sacrificed on the alter of interethnic racial reconciliation. However variously interpreted, though, barbaresques opened a third space of identity. Through barbaresques, black intellectu-als splintered the limiting binaries of black/white, African/American, and savage/civilized and created new subject positions as well as new collective histories.

The first Arab American novelist, Ameen Rihani, also retranslated tropes of Arabo- Islamic identity familiar from nineteenth- century Amer-ican literature to create a narrative of American continuity for a diaspora group, Arab migrants to the New World. In his modernist novel The Book of Khalid, Rihani invents a plot that mirrors the contact narratives dis-cussed in the first two chapters. The novel begins with a description of an image that the faux editors of the “discovered” novel have found on the inside jacket of The Book of Khalid, an image “represent[ing] a New York skyscraper in the shape of a Pyramid.”51 With a healthy dose of humor, Rihani migrates his Syrian hero through a number of archetypal American identities before finally allowing him to realize his Arab des-tiny. The relationship between America and the Arab world established in nineteenth- century literature is reversed as the United States appears as the contact zone and Arab identity is consolidated through projections of images of America. Ultimately Rihani reads Western romantic litera-ture’s representation of Arabs contrapuntally to create a vision of pan- Arab political representation, “The United States of Arabia,” modeled on the United States.

Chapter 5 concentrates on the emergence of Arab American literary self- representation by moving through a historiography of Arab migra-tion to America and toward an analysis of Rihani’s literary and political writings. As a first- generation Arab American, Rihani inherited the canon

Introduction 29

of representation that American Arabesque details. His re- formation of that canon provides invaluable insight into the human ligatures connect-ing the experience of American immigration and the geist of Arab lib-eralism that ultimately found expression in the early twentieth- century pan- Arabia movement. Positioned at the headwaters of an indigenous Arab intellectual reawakening, the nahdah, and a migrant Arab politi-cal consciousness, the mahjar, Rihani articulates a vision of Arab identity that embraces arabesque self- representation as a form of empowerment. Rihani’s figure of the Arab is built from both Arab and American literary traditions. The fictional editors in The Book of Khalid describe the novel as a “weaving” where “the material is of such a mixture that here and there the raw silk of Syria is often spun with the cotton and wool of America” (v). The book ends, however, not with Khalid’s successful immigration to America but rather with his migration across the globe and eventually to the Arabian Desert. Rihani’s goal is the formation of a pan- Arab identity that self- consciously blends Orient and Occident, modern and traditional, Islamic and Christian, America and Arabia to create mahjar or migrant identity. Rihani’s use of literary logic to make arguments for the political recognition of Arabs provides a salient historical example of one man’s belief in the power of figural representation to change the material world.

In closing this introduction, I want to acknowledge that this book is a first step, not a last word. Now more than ever before, Arabs, Muslims, and Arab Americans are part of the national conversation about what constitutes American identity. Now more than ever before, scholars of American Studies have an opportunity to enter that conversation. This book provides a history of American representation of Arabs, Muslims, and Arab Americans as well as a history of these groups’ efforts at self- representation. In this sense, American Arabesque insists that current dis-cussions about the relationship between being American and being Arab have significant nineteenth- century antecedents. But beyond its genealog-ical function, American Arabesque challenges us to recognize that Arabs, real and imagined, have always been part of American culture. Repre-sentations of the Arab have always influenced the way U.S. citizens have defined their “unique” national identity. The aesthetic sensibilities a cul-ture produces and the market tastes these productions respond to provide invaluable information about how communities define themselves as dis-crete entities, as well as how they negotiate those definitions. This book is an examination of a particular kind of American aesthetic production, the image of the Arab in the long nineteenth century. The Arab immigrant,

30 Introduction

as well as the second- , third- , or fourth- generation Arab American, who reads these pages will recognize, I hope, his or her own story vibrating within the narrative of American race, nation, and literature that this book details. The larger point, though, is to demonstrate how profoundly provisional, contextual, and fluid all American identities are— how these identities, like figures of the Arab, are themselves aesthetic placeholders that translate imaginaries into realities and back again and back again in what we might call an arabesque pattern.